Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Book History • Digital Humanities

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Thank you for visiting! I am a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. I am trained in nineteenth-century literature and print history, I have been certified by UNC-Chapel Hill in digital humanities, and I teach courses in composition and rhetoric, general fiction, women’s writing, and popular genres. My focus on the material implications of reading, writing, and print production across the nineteenth century informs my dissertation, titled “Defining the Industrial Book.” In it, I present an alternative history of the early-industrial book told from the perspective of domestic and laboring audiences. Far from passive consumers, I show that these audiences actively reproduced the book according to their own reading and writing cultures.

My research has appeared in Brontë Studies, English Literature in Transition: 1880–1920, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and The Coleridge Bulletin. I have also contributed short essays to Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. Currently, I am revising an article on The Pickwick Papers for Victorian Literature and Culture.

Aside from my university teaching and research, I manage a digital archive, The Digital Women’s World; I have worked with the annual, NEH-funded public humanities program, The Jane Austen Summer Program; and I have led lifelong education programming in the Chapel Hill community.

Contact me at elshand@live.unc.edu.

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